In this episode of B2B Business Class, I sat down with Candyce Edelen, President and CEO of Propel Growth, to talk about personalization and sales tactics that work — and those that don’t.
We also discussed connecting with prospects meaningfully, building trust, and creating profitable sales relationships without sending thousands of spammy emails.
How the SaaS Bros Killed Sales
Candyce began our conversation with a controversial and unpopular opinion — she believes the “SaaS bros” have broken sales.
From her observation, many small companies want to follow the model that the SaaS bros have developed, which is to hire junior salespeople to conduct prospect outreach en masse.
Candyce argues that they use a “spray and pray” approach that is not personalized, has little relevance to the prospect, and is highly automated. In short, they’re simply copying and pasting an email cadence regardless of the industry that is being targeted.
She thinks reaching out to prospects in industries the salesperson knows nothing about is detrimental and could harm their organization’s reputation.
“When everybody piles on, it stops working because they’re not doing it well,” Candyce explained.
“ They broke sales [because now] everybody is copying things that are much more strategic than people understand when they copy those cadences. It's just disheartening to see it — and frustrating.”
Why “Plug-and-Play” Tactics Don’t Work in Sales
To hit sales quotas and close more deals, many salespeople try to “chase new hacks” and find shortcuts that could help them reach more prospects within a shorter timeframe.
In short, they’re trying to find that “silver bullet”.
For Candyce, there’s no such thing in sales. For salespeople to succeed in their roles, it’s important for them to not only understand their target audience but also to develop an effective sales strategy.
“There's no magic wand, no silver bullet, and no easy button in sales,” she remarked.
Candyce highlighted Gong as an example of a company that excels at this.
“ They have phenomenal product market fit. They're serving a very felt need [that] started as a product-led growth (PLG) strategy,” she stated. “So all of these things come together.”
“The business development representative (BDR) is experiencing the value of the platform, and they can have a conversation with you or me and understand the pain points we're experiencing.”
For Candyce, the challenge lies when switching from product to outreach.
Many BDRs will obtain a list of companies in a specific region of the country and identify the prospects (e.g., CFOs). They then put a thousand of them into a list and run a pre-programmed sequence against them. They often don’t do any research into these individuals and treat every prospect the same way.
Candyce believes that this approach destroys sales from the perspective of response rates. Many salespeople using the SaaS bros approach are plugging thousands of emails into outreach.
“They’re trying to land in the inbox by warming up email addresses and just burning one email address after another,” Candyce observed. “Every time you and I mark it for spam, it starts to burn that email address.”
Personalized Sales and Relationship-Building Are the Way to Go
Candyce recommends salespeople replace the mass outreach approach with one that focuses on playing the long game and using a more personalized method.
“I believe it really requires a human-to-human approach where we stop treating people like numbers,” she said.
She emphasized that this approach is crucial in B2B, as many are reaching out to companies and asking them to change how they do business to adopt their tech.
“ That takes a lot of trust from that company, and that trust is not going to be built over a pitch-slappy email cadence or cold calls done by a college grad [who] doesn't understand [the prospect’s industry],” Candyce elaborated.
This “human-to-human” approach requires more effort from salespeople, as they would need to research and invest time and effort to build relationships to nurture the leads further.
“If we can build trust, sales will get much easier. We have to play the long game,” she commented.
Candyce also explained the importance of treating prospects like human beings and working with them to have a genuine connection to build that relationship.
“ If they're not in the market now, get them into your email nurturing and a cadence of nurturing — not pitching, not selling, but nurturing them, educating them, inviting them to events, drawing them into your world, [and] helping them see the world the way you see it,” she said.
“You can become the trusted advisor, so when that 97 percent is ready to start looking, you're the natural choice,” she emphasized.